Dr. Loraine received a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley, where she later worked as part of the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Project.  She then worked for several years as a bioinformatics scientist at Neomorphic and Affymetrix before joining the faculty of Univ. Alabama at Birmingham as an Assistant Professor. She has been at UNC Charlotte, where she is an Associate Professor, since 2008. Her laboratory investigates fundamental and applied questions in plant biology, using techniques from genomics, bioinformatics, molecular biology, and genetics; and develops visualization software for genomics. Specific projects are focused on genome visualization, cytokinin signal transduction, alternative splicing, blueberry genomics and pollen research.